Any bets on who will win the battle over NASA’s future?

Much coverage was given Wednesday to the President’s budget concerning NASA, the highlights of which can be found here.

As expected, the President’s plan included $105 million in seed funding for a plan to robotically capture an asteroid and bring it to a location near the moon, where astronauts could explore it.

Message from NASA: the future is bright. (NASA)

The plan also includes $822 million in funding for commercial space, which would allow companies like SpaceX and Boeing to develop space taxis to transport astronauts to and from the International Space Station by 2017. There’s also money in the budget for NASA’s Orion space capsule and rocket to make an unmanned flight in 2018. If you’re an optimist.

The planetary science community is upset because funding for robotic missions — like the Curiosity rover scuttling over the surface of Mars — is being cut to 2007 levels. There’s no money here for really exciting missions like a probe to Europa, or a mission to return Martian rocks to Earth.

The budget papers over the true fight, which has been ongoing for three years now, between Congress and the President over what NASA should be doing with its human exploration program.

Bolden. (AP)

Last week NASA administrator Charlie Bolden said this of NASA’s human exploration plans, “I don’t know how to say it any more plainly. NASA does not have a human lunar mission in its portfolio and we are not planning for one.” And there is no money in the budget for one. The only money for a human mission beyond low-Earth orbit is the seed funding for a possible astronaut trip to the asteroid a robotic probe brings back to the Earth-moon system.

But many members of Congress, including a healthy and bipartisan group of Houston-area representatives, doesn’t care.

As Bolden was laying out the President’s space plan on Wednesday, this group of legislators were reintroducing their plan for NASA, the RE-asserting American Leadership in Space Act, or REAL Space Act. It definitively specifies the moon as NASA’s destination of record, not a series of as-yet unspecified destinations that will one day bring astronauts to the surface of Mars.

Among the politically diverse voices supporting the reintroduced bill were:

“Space is the world’s ultimate high ground, returning to the Moon and reinvigorating our human space flight program is a matter of national security. Returning to the moon would allow NASA to continue to develop technologies that have not only enhanced our exploration programs but have been applied across all disciplines of science. ”– Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee.

“Last year, the National Research Council committee charged with reviewing NASA’s strategic direction found that there was no support within NASA or from our international partners for the administration’s proposed asteroid mission. However, there is broad support for NASA to lead a return to the Moon. So the U.S. can either lead that effort, or another country will step up and lead that effort in our absence — which would be very unfortunate.” – Rep. Frank Wolf, Chairman of the House Commerce-Justice-Science Appropriations Subcommittee.

In Washington the President provides the budget blueprint, but Congress authorizes the funds.

Many of these legislators do not like the asteroid blueprint. Many of these legislators will still be here in 2016, when President Barack Obama is gone. Chances are the next President will not feel beholden to the President’s asteroid plan, which doesn’t exactly have the same cachet as President Kennedy’s Apollo program.

So, does anyone want to take bets on what NASA’s manned spaceflight blueprint will look like in 2016?